


mono no aware

by Glassea



Category: The Lorien Legacies - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Immortality, Non-Linear Narrative, Reincarnation, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide, marina-centric, suicide is the major theme please be warned, this is bad but i have feelings™
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-27
Updated: 2017-11-27
Packaged: 2019-02-07 15:43:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,260
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12844332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Glassea/pseuds/Glassea
Summary: A re-imagining of the charm.





	mono no aware

**Author's Note:**

> "mono no aware || rōmaji transcription of 物の哀れ  
> 1\. the pathos of things  
> 2\. awareness of the impermanence of beauty  
> 3\. a wistful awareness of the transcience of things"
> 
> there is so much suicide in this. please be warned.
> 
> this fandom is never going to let me go, i haven't even read all the books but marina is still one of my favorite characters of all time, rip me

5.

In this lifetime her name is Marina and Six's is Maren.

They are -

 

"Chrome refrigerators," Maren says. Marina laughs, scribbles it down. They're playing Mad Libs in a coffee shop like they're eighteen and innocent.

(They've lived four lifetimes by now and haven't been children for any of them.)

"Large number," Marina reads.

"Two," Maren shoots back. Her grin is what John might have described as shit-eating, if he were here. He should be here. He's late again.

"Maren, no. Two is not a large number." Maren goes to laugh, but her eyes widen, caught on something over Marina's shoulder, and before Marina can turn she hears the sound of screeching metal, feels the burn on her ankle. She's felt everyone's scars before. She knows this one belongs to John. To Four.

Marina screams.

 

In this lifetime Seven's name is Marina and Six's is Maren and Four's was John.

They were -

Happy. For once.

Four was the first to die in this life. The rest of them can only follow.

 

\--

 

238.

"Please don't leave me," One begs. She looks so young, and it's not just because she's seven years old. One has always hated being the last of them to live, has always hated the aloneness. "Please."

"I'm so sorry," Seven says, and tries not to cough. Seven is the last of them. Except for One.

Someone messed up, somewhere along the way, because One was born exactly a century after the rest of them were. It's not that they're always born at the same time, because they're not, but a hundred years in between births is excessive, even for them, the ones who have eternity to live.

That means that for this lifetime, One will outlast all of them. Has outlasted all of them. Seven closes her eyes and breathes out.

"I'm so sorry, One."

Seven's spent one hundred and seven years in this lifetime. It's okay for her to move on. It's not an escape. That's what she keeps telling herself and she knows it's true.

But later that night, when she wheezes out her breaths and her chest burns with electricity from the defibrilators, her last thoughts are an apology to One. Sorry that I'm leaving you alone.

 

\--

 

37.

They're superheroes this time around.

("That's kind of awesome," Five says. Three nods in fervent agreement. Seven meets Six's gaze and doesn't roll her eyes, but it's a close thing. No matter the lifetime, they'll always be nerds.)

"I take it back." Three ducks behind Seven's fallen chunk of concrete as laser fire - and seriously, laser guns, what even - flies all around them. "This is less than awesome."

"Aw," Nine says over the comms. His voice is sometimes hard to pick out, because when he's running, the wind is ridiculously strong. "Don't be like that. Have a sense of adventure, Three."

"You know what, Nine -"

Two's voice is long-suffering. "I'm trying to concentrate. Hacking alien technology isn't as easy as it looks."

"It looks like you're meditating," Four says, amused. "It looks pretty damn easy."

Eight obviously finds the whole thing hilarious. "I'd be careful around your coffee machine for the next week, Four. Don't aggravate the technopath."

"Guys," Six cuts in, "I see Five."

"Ah, shit." Three crouches further down in the hiding place he shares with Seven. "He still mind-controlled?"

Six hums. "Looks like yes. Unless he normally carries around laser guns, which. Well. Actually."

Five is a nerd. He's probably got at least three cosplays with laser guns. They're all aware of this.

"...You know what, he's shooting at us, let's just go with the mind control."

Though the shooting is, like the laser gun, not uncommon for Five. Five and Nine have never gotten along.

One's voice effectively cuts them all off. "Plan. Nine, draw their fire. Two, keep doing what you're doing. Three, you're her cover."

"Right." Three stands to a crouch, peers around the edge of the concrete, and almost immediately sprints towards Two's position. Seven can't see either of them. The dust is making visibility extremely difficult.

"We need to figure out how to free Five," Four gasps out. There's an explosion to Seven's right and she'd bet anything that it's because of Four and his strange affinity for pyrotechnics.

"You, you just keep blowing stuff up," One orders. "But yeah, that's kind of the plan. Six? You help him. Eight, take Seven in close. D'you think you can heal him?"

The dryness in Seven's mouth has very little to do with the choking dust. "I think I can, but I don't know for sure."

"Try it."

Eight winks into existence next to Seven. She jumps in surprise despite her best efforts to keep still. He grins at her shock, offers his arm.

"Shall we?"

Seven grips Eight's elbow. Her vision goes black. By the time it returns, they're maybe thirty yards behind Five, hidden by the crumbled remains of buildings and the general chaos of the fight.

"Good luck," Eight tells her, and then he's gone.

Seven breathes and starts moving.

She's quiet. Seven's sure of that. Five still knows she's there, somehow.

When he turns she's three yards away, hands already outstretched towards his head, her healing glowing blue around her fingers. She's too close and not fast enough to react if he does fire. His eyes are completely empty.

"Please," she says. "Five. I want to help you, I'm not going to hurt -"

Something rips through her stomach.

Oh, Seven thinks. Oh.

It hurts. It hurts a lot.

Someone's screaming and it's not her.

It's not that she's unused to dying. Living this many lifetimes desensitizes you to feeling your body growing numb, to hearing your own heartbeat slow, to waiting for the blackness to take over your vision.

It's just that Seven isn't often the first to die. And she isn't often - ever - killed by Five.

 

Here's what will happen after.

It will feel like only seconds before she wakes in a new life, gasping at the memory of her own death. Five will apologize, eventually, and Seven will know he's sincere, but she'll still remember his gun pointed straight at her and the emptiness in his eyes. Her forgiveness will be false.

Five will know that; she'll be able to tell from the way his face crumples, a little. She will tell herself she'll be able to forgive him later.

 

She never gets around to forgiveness and she wonders, lifetimes after, whether it was her that started him spiraling.

 

\--

 

102.

Seven's given up on thinking of herself in terms of her current life. No part of her is Ngori; she's Seven. Seven seven 7.

She leaves Peru as soon as she's able, runs into One and Nine in America. She finds them in Boston in a freaking Starbucks.

When they see each other, it's not hello or how are you or oh God I've missed you. They've spent too many lifetimes together for that. No, the first words out of Seven's mouth -

"Have you found him?"

And One doesn't even need to ask who she's talking about, just nods.

"Dominion," Nine tells her. "It's in Denver."

"Good," Seven says.

They've had to start institutionalizing Five whenever they can, because ever since that fateful lifetime where Five killed them and Seven killed Five, Five's been hunting them. Not in a sane, ordered way. One lifetime he blew up the Golden Gate Bridge just to try and get to them. Six told her, later, that three hundred and six civilians died. So it's safer for everyone, really, when Five's... restricted.

It must mean something that Seven can't bring herself to feel guilt about this, the fact that they're essentially resigning Five to infinite lifetimes incarcerated, anymore. Her psychology teacher would say that she's becoming disconnected from the world. He'd tell her, in an infuriatingly calm voice, that she should consider seeking a therapist. Seven would tell him that he could get back to judging her after one of his best friends killed him twice and directly attempted murder eleven more.

"The others?" One asks Seven, voice a little desperate. "Any of them?"

"Sorry," Seven tells her. "I've been in Peru. I'm only here for school, on scholarship. But I think - I think Six is somewhere in Malaysia. And Eight might be in Russia."

See, Six and Seven and Eight have always been the closest out of all of them. After being reborn more than a hundred times, their bond is more powerful than anyone else's. Seven gets the ghost of a laugh when she spins a globe and lets her fingers trail over Malaysia; she wakes up, sometimes, with Russian on the tip of her tongue.

"That's a place to start," Nine grins. "C'mon. Let's get looking."

Seven smiles back, fragile and uncertain, and tries to push Five from her mind.

 

\--

 

8.

"We're going to die here, aren't we." Four says it like a statement even though it should be a question.

"Yeah," Three says, "We are."

All nine of them are crammed around one of those train tables meant for four, a circle of calm while the passengers around them scream and cry and pray to whoever will listen. The nine of them sit and don't bother praying. They know, better than most, that prayers don't do much of anything, in the end.

"See you on the other side," One tells them all, and her mouth twitches up, sardonic.

Seven braces herself against Five, who's sitting next to her. She meets Two's eyes across the table. The other girl looks scared. Seven is scared too. (Dying is not easy for them, yet.)

They both close their eyes just before the walls splinter in.

 

\--

 

67.

There is a gravestone and a cemetary and the shadow of Two's suicide hanging over them all.

And, a realization -

"We're not enough to keep each other alive."

 

\--

 

66.

"It's him," One says. Her hand drags over her face, tired and guilty. "Unresponsive. They don't think he'll ever recover."

John Doe, the sign on the door says. Two pulls out a Sharpie and passes it to Four. Four uncaps the marker, adjusts his grip, and squeezes a small 5 in the lower right corner.

"He wanted to forget. Didn't he." Nine's mouth is pressed in a tight line.

"We can't leave him like this," Two says, quiet.

"They don't know whether he's aware," One tells her.

"But if he is. If he is we can't leave him."

"No," Six snaps. "No, Two, God - no. We can't start killing ourselves as soon as one of us - we can't."

"And why not?" Two never stands up to anyone but she does now. Her voice would be a yell if it weren't a whisper. "We'll just wake up again anyways." Then, softer, "We always wake up."

Seven doesn't say anything, just watches. She's pretty sure Three and Four are with Six. Nine's not fully behind Two, yet, but it's a close thing because he's angry at the world, always has been, and even reincarnation can't change that. One and Eight aren't decided either way.

And Seven - Seven thinks she would kill for those short heartbeats in between lives, when the world is finally quiet and she is nothing. She thinks she would kill to keep herself in that place.

No. That's not right.

Seven doesn't think she would kill for those things.

She knows that she would.

 

\--

 

83.

Five grins and lifts the knife under Seven and Six's horrified gazes. He licks the blood off of it, unaware or uncaring when the blade cuts his tongue, when the blood smears across his face. He smiles, wider, as he straightens up from his crouch. "Time for us all to go."

And they'd known that the others were dying off faster than normal, but they hadn't been able to get in contact with them in this medieval sort of world. It had just been Seven and Six and Four and they hadn't known -

They hadn't known that Five was the one hunting them down. Killing them off. So when Four saw Five, he hadn't been guarded. Hadn't thought that he'd need to defend himself.

Five steps carelessly over Four's body. Seven's ankle is screaming.

"We're wrong, you know?" Five shakes his head like he's disappointed, somehow, and laughs. It's chilling and twisted and nothing like how it used to sound. "Shouldn't be alive right now. Should've died the first time, with Lorien. I guess we'll be falling forever."

"No," Six says. "No, Five, you're wrong, this is wrong. Stop this."

He keeps moving forwards, and he's five strides away, then four, then three, and -

This is wrong. This is all wrong. Five stalking towards them with this unfamiliar light in his eyes, Six gripping a blade but unwilling to move against him, the nine of them dying and dying and dying. It's wrong and Seven wants it to end.

It would be easy enough for Seven to lie to herself. She could pretend that it's all instinct, that she didn't mean it, that she did what she had to do in order to survive. But that's not true. Seven knows exactly what she's doing. And when Six's next breath rasps in, she knows exactly who she's doing it for.

Five falls with her knife buried in his throat.

It would be appropriate if the moment felt frozen in time. As it is, nothing stops. The world marches on. His gurgling breaths end and the burning begins. Seven is the only thing left unchanging.

Six reaches for her, pulls her back. "Seven. Seven, we need to go."

She lets herself be led. Only when they've settled into an inn several miles south of their location does she start to shake. Curls up into a ball in the center of their temporary bed and shivers, her teeth chattering like it's cold even though it's the middle of summer. She can't get the sound of Five struggling to breathe around his own blood out of her head. She can't stop seeing Four's face, his one intact eye glassy and staring. Six reaches for her, both of them seeking comfort in the other, and Seven knows that she's stuck in the same nightmare.

"Six. I killed him. Six. What did I do? God, what did I do?"

"What you had to." Six doesn't sound like she believes her own words.

Neither one of them sleeps that night, but they don't dare to move until dawn crawls over their entwined forms. Six is crying. Seven thinks she ran out of tears fifty lifetimes ago.

 

\--

 

509.

"If there's one thing I've learned from reincarnation," Four says, "It's that individual lives are insignificant."

"We didn't think that, at first."

"No." Four looks at her. "We didn't. But we do now."

Seven can't find a reason to disagree with him.

 

\--

 

91.

"Please stop. Five, please. We'll die. Hundreds of innocent people will die."

One's hand rests on her gun even as she tries to talk him down.

Five just laughs. The sound is mad and twisted and terrible. "I think we all know that death doesn't mean much."

For a second it's dead quiet. Seven almost breathes. And then Five moves. Three brings his gun up, shoots Five in the head, but he's not fast enough.

And she knows it can't be real, that the scars don't start that fast, but Seven still thinks she can feel Five and One and Nine and Three burning their way into her skin in the instant before the bridge explodes beneath her.

 

\--

 

153.

"I don't think we understood, back then. What this meant."

Eight looks at her through the bars, flicks his trunk back and forth along the ground.

And that's what they don't tell you about reincarnation - though it's very likely, there's no guarantee that you'll be human every time.

They do tell you that immortality is horrific. That you live and live and live and there is literally no way for it to end.

Seven is tired. They all are.

"They warned us. Pittacus warned us. We were so stupid." So young. Too naïve to think that life could be infinitely worse than death. "Do you ever wish we'd stayed?"

(Was surviving a dying dimension worth all of this? Seven's answer is no.)

Eight doesn't answer. Of course he doesn't. He's an elephant. But he does raise his trunk to the bars where Seven stands. Carefully, so as not to touch the fence, because they learned the hard way that it's actually electrified.

"Eight. God, Eight. It's just us now. For this lifetime, at least." Five was killed early on, before any of them could get to him (to lock him up), and they never found out how it happened, though Seven has her suspicions. Five's managed to kill himself even when on suicide watch. And then. A plane crash for Four and Nine. (They'd been flying in to see Eight.) Cancer for Six. Gang violence for One and Three, the stupid, heroic idiots. Suicide for Two, because Two has always been more prone to it than the rest of them. This was a life of unfortunate accidents. Seven wonders how many lives it'll take until they're all offing themselves as soon as they wake up.

And Eight. Eight's dying too. Because sixty-five's not bad for Seven, a human, but Eight was born in captivity and the average lifespan of a male African elephant is less than sixty years. He doesn't have long. And then Seven will be alone until she dies and they're all born again.

"Ma'am," a young woman says. Seven turns to see an employee with a bucket and mop in hand, obviously waiting for the last visitor to vacate. "The zoo's closing."

"Thank you," Seven tells her, turns. "I'll be back tomorrow," she tells Eight. The woman looks faintly unnerved at Seven talking to an elephant but doesn't comment, just waits for her to leave.

She walks slowly towards the exit. It's fall bordering on winter and the leaves rain from the trees every time the wind blows.

Mary Reyes takes the Red Line back to her empty apartment and waits for the morning to come.

At 3:08 AM exactly she wakes up screaming. It's more the loneliness than the burning. Another one of them snuffed out, gone. Insignificant to most of the world. Everything to Seven.

She doesn't go back to the zoo again. There's no reason to.

(Seven goes back to the train station, though. A one-way trip on to the tracks.)

("Wait for me. I'm coming.")

 

\--

 

1.

Pittacus looks at the nine of them. "You understand that you won't come back. That you'll be dropping through multiverses forever. You will never die."

"We know," One says. "But we'll live. Be the only survivors of this dimension. Someone has to remember."

"I wouldn't worry," Three grins. "We have each other. And you'll die, soon. Whenever this dimension collapses. You won't remember us, not when you're dead."

"And when you grow tired of living?" Katerina's brow is furrowed.

"We'll have each other," One says, like it's just that simple. Seven grips Six's hand tighter, reaches for Eight's.

Pittacus nods to Henri. Henri sucks in a fortifying breath, but when he hits the button, his hands don't shake.

The poison entering their bloodstreams does its work quickly.

This is the first and the best time they die. Painless and fast, within seconds of each other. Together.

 

\--

 

2.

Seven opens her eyes as Fa Ying and begins her search of the globe.


End file.
